June McDoom

About this event

There is a hush most of us only knew as children, the warm drift between familiar household

sounds and being carried to bed, a place that belongs to you and to some self you have not met

yet. June McDoomʼs debut full-length, Follow the Light, lives in that dream space and then keeps

walking, slipping out of time and waking somewhere new, barely familiar enough to feel like home

yet wholly your own.

She came up in a Jamaican household on the edge of the Florida Everglades, an existence built of

extended family, communal care, bass and harmonics. Her father, a carpenter and a student of

sound, built his own speakers and kept three sound systems going across as many rooms. His low

end would rise through her bedroom floor like some wayward cat while she lay above it with folk

records, finding harmonies that were new and hers alone. Two musics in one room. Lushness as

past and premonition.

She found folk on her own, somewhere between the cast recording of The Sound of Music and

Simon and Garfunkel, while everyone around her called it sleepy music. She did not mind being the

only one. The solitude let her fall for harmony first, before words, before anything else, and

harmony is still the thing she reaches for.

Generationally speaking, the music was already in the air. Her grandfather, Colin Smith, is a

distinguished mento man who played banjo and guitar and built his own rumba boxes, worked to

keep Jamaicaʼs oldest acoustic folk form alive. Mento is the root of all of it: ska, rock steady,

reggae, dub and everything after. He is the one who put a guitar in her hands. An inheritance, a gift

and a map. Even her name is part of it, though she will tell you she landed on it more by feel than

reason. She records as June McDoom, born Alyssa, June being a nickname one of her

grandmothers, Joan, went by, a name she thought was cool to carry and simply liked the sound of.

An etheric channel that reverberates all the same. A dub all its own.

Made slowly and by hand with her longtime partner Evan Wright, Follow the Light lays the

harmony of folk over the rhythm of dub, with Dionne Warwick, Minnie Riperton, Pentangle and the

washed guitars of Cocteau Twins haunting its outer edges. Voice and guitar seeking each other out

first, then everything else stacked across long days in the studio they keep at home, restraint kept

on purpose. The lead single “Without You” is the whole method surfacing, split open and sparkling

like a geode in a creek bed. Angelic heroics, and nothing less.

At the heart is family. Her grandmother Aggie, the light behind “Memory,” guiding still. And

underneath, the quieter truth the record keeps: none of us are only one person, but a continuum of

selves, the ones who shaped us and the ones we have yet to meet. Future you is an ancestor your

current self gets to greet. Press play and the same invitation is yours: A few minutes out of time, a

place that turns familiar the longer you stay until you surface somewhere new and find it

was yours all along.

Accessibility Disclaimer: Barboza is not wheelchair accessible.

Important Information:

* This event is 21 & over. Valid ID is required. Minors will not be permitted entry.

* Doors open at the listed event time.

* Event start time is generally one hour after doors open but is subject to change without notice.

* All tickets are nonrefundable with the exception of event cancellation.

* Support acts are subject to change.

* Orders in violation of the published ticket limit are subject to cancellation without notice.

From Barboza